Grass is growing from the gutters of Fresno’s historic train station. That’s not ideal | Opinion

Until recently, the rain gutters on my house and those at Fresno’s historic railway station had something in common.

Both had grass and weeds growing out of them. A sure sign someone isn’t paying attention.

In the case of my house, that someone is obvious. Because there aren’t any trees with branches extending over the roof, it never occurred to me to clear out the gutters every so often. So I didn’t. For more than eight years.

Then last week, while pulling into the driveway and looking up at the gutters, I was surprised to see grass peeking out. How in the world did that get up there? So I put on some old gardening gloves, climbed a ladder set next to the garage and removed handfuls of mud and plant material scoop by scoop.

I couldn’t believe how many scoops. But then I thought about all the dust. Not just the normal San Joaquin Valley variety, but dust created by nearby home construction in my neck of Clovis. Combine years of dust and some seeds transported by a bird or blown in by the wind, add a little rain and voilà. You get grass growing from gutters.

Opinion

Fortunately for me, the gutter gunk was removed before there was any sign of water damage to my house.

And if you stand beneath the eaves and look up at the soffits (the horizontal material connecting the exterior wall to the edge of the roof), the black paint is stained with light-colored splotches.

“Those are pretty obvious signs of water damage,” said Fresno architect Bill Reeve, who observed the debris-filled gutters and stained soffits during a recent visit.

“This is a lack of maintenance issue, and I would suspect that the gutters at the station haven’t been ‘maintained’ in years for the problem to be this bad. The biggest threat to any building is water. If we don’t keep it out, it will cause damage.”

Opened in 1899 for the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad, the Santa Fe Passenger Depot is one of Fresno’s most historically significant and striking buildings. Designed in the Mission Revival style with archways and sloping red tile roofs, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

City’s neglect showing

Like most of Fresno’s old buildings, the one at 2650 Tulare St. has a checkered history. It sat vacant for most of the 1990s until being purchased and renovated by the city of Fresno between 2003-05 for $6 million to serve as downtown’s public transportation hub.

Nearly 20 years after the station’s ballyhooed reopening, fairly obvious signs of further neglect are starting to show.

As explained by Reeve, an East Coast native whose eyes can’t help but look for water damage, the stains could either be caused by water that overflowed from the debris-filled gutters and then worked its way back toward the exterior wall or by standing water that got trapped on the roof and soaked through.

Either way, it’s not good. The only certainty is the longer those gutters stay clogged — with another deluge forecast this weekend — the worse the damage will get.

“Whenever you get standing water on top of a building, it generally finds its way in,” Reeve said.

According to information provided by city spokesperson Sontaya Rose, Fresno’s own General Services Department is responsible for maintaining the station’s “exterior elements” — a category that would seem to include rain gutters.

So it’s the city, not Amtrak or Greyhound, which needs to get on the ball. And I suspect after she gets through reading this, City Manager Georgeanne White will be on the horn with the pertinent department head. If that hasn’t already happened.

“In California, because there isn’t a lot of rain, we tend to get a little lazy about cleaning out gutters,” Reeve said. “We don’t think about what happens when gutters overflow. But water is the thing that can do the most damage to any building.”

That applies to 20-year-old houses like mine and also to 125-year-old train stations. Don’t forget about those gutters.